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WORK TITLE: The Dictator’s Army
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WEBSITE: http://www.caitlintalmadge.com/
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https://elliott.gwu.edu/talmadge * http://www.caitlintalmadge.com/uploads/8/5/4/1/85419560/talmadgecvfebruary2017.pdf *
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LOC is still down.
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Harvard College, A.B. (summa cum laude), 2003; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ph.D., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, research assistant, 2003-04; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, Department of Political Science, research assistant, 2004-07; Long-Term Strategy Project, Cambridge, MA, researcher and writer, 2006; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, Seminar XXI Program, research associate, 2009-11; George Washington University, Washington, DC, Elliott School of International Affairs, assistant professor of political science and international affairs, and member of Institute for Security and Conflict Studies (ISCS), 2011—. International Security Studies Forum, H-Diplo, associate editor, 2016—.
MEMBER:American Political Science Association, International Studies Association, Council on Foreign Relations, Women in International Security, Tobin Project, GW Nuclear Security Working Group, Center for a New American Security Next Generation National Security Leaders, American-Israeli Academic Exchange, German Marshall Fund Young Strategists Forum, Project 2049 Delegation to Taiwan, China-U.S. Young Scholars Dialogue.
AWARDS:Detur Prize, Harvard College, 1999-2000; John Harvard Scholarship, 1999-2003; Directors’ Internship Grant, Harvard Institute of Politics, 2002; Manfred Wörner Fellowship, German Marshall Fund, 2005; Pre-doctoral Fellowship, Olin Institute, 2007-08; Certificate of Distinction in Undergraduate Teaching, Harvard University, 2008; Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institution, 2008-09; Grant for Summer Research, MIT Center for International Studies, 2008, 2009; World Politics & Statecraft Fellowship, 2009; Visiting Scholar and Bryce Grant, APSA Centennial Center 2009-10; ISCS Grant, both 2011; Elliott School Faculty Research Fund Grant, 2011, 2015; Policy Research Scholar, George Washington Institute of Public Policy, 2012; Carnegie Grants to Study U.S. Nuclear Strategy in Asia (with ISCS colleagues), 2013-15, 2016-18; Facilitating Fund Grant, George Washington University, 2014; Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, 2014-15; Minerva Initiative Grant, U.S. Department of Defense (with ISCS colleagues),2015-17; Junior Faculty Fellowship, Smith Richardson Foundation, 2016-18.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including The Sword’s Other Edge: Trade-offs in Military Effectiveness and Crude Strategy: Rethinking the U.S. Military Commitment to Defend Persian Gulf Oil. Contributor to journals, including Security Studies, International Security, and Journal of Conflict Resolution.
SIDELIGHTS
Caitlin Talmadge is an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. She has written on civil-military relations, military effectiveness, defense policy, nuclear strategy, and Persian Gulf security issues.
U.S. Defense Politics
Talmadge collaborated with Harvey Sapolsky and Eugene Gholz on U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy when she was a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The authors look at aspects of politics that affect the military, including what policies should be set by politicians and which by experts in the field, which responsibilities should be centralized and which should be decentralized, and to what extent the military should work with the private sector. They endorse cooperation between the military and private businesses, which has brought about useful developments in technology, and also cooperation between the military and civilian leaders in government. They include discussion questions and suggestions for further reading.
Air Force Staff Sgt. Justin N. Theriot, reviewing the book in Air & Space Power Journal, found it “relevant and worthwhile” for his branch of the military. “Specifically, I recommend it to all senior noncommissioned officers and junior officers as well as to other service members who desire a fundamental understanding of how politics affects the military,” he added.
The Dictator's Army
In The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes, Talmadge examines the reasons for variation in performance among military forces fielded by governments of this nature. She explains that regimes facing coup threats attempt to weaken their militaries, especially by trying to prevent the most capable officers from rising through the ranks. When governments perceive no danger of a coup, they allow their armed forces to perform up to their maximum potential. She provides case studies on two wars and four armies: the fighting between North Vietnam and South Vietnam from the 1950s through the 1970s, and of the Iran-Iraq conflicts of the 1980s. North Vietnamese officials, she writes, did not see a coup as likely, so they pursued policies that enhanced their armed forces’ effectiveness, while the leaders of South Vietnam feared a coup and ended up undermining their army. Studying the hostilities between Iran and Iraq gives her the opportunity to trace variations within a regime. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, she notes, initially used what she calls “coup-proofing” practices, but then deemphasized them when he perceived the threat from Iran to be greater than the possibility of a coup.
“In The Dictator’s Army I sought to make sense of variation in military performance that is puzzling from the perspective of existing theories — particularly variation in military effectiveness across different units of the same military or in the same military over time,” Talmadge wrote on the International Security Studies Forum’s Web site, responding to a roundtable of reviewers. “Such variation is hard to explain if military power is a function of fairly static factors such as national wealth or culture. … Ultimately, my goal was to offer a framework that could help scholars studying military performance, as well as policymakers seeking to assess or influence it in the real world.”
Several critics thought her work would indeed be useful. “Two of the many contributions that The Dictator’s Army makes to the study of military effectiveness strike me as particularly important,” remarked Jasen Castillo as part of the reviewers’ roundtable on the site. “First, the book provides a comprehensive list of the organizational practices that are logically and empirically linked to skill on the conventional battlefield. … Second, the book’s theory puts flesh on the bones of James Quinlivan’s original insights into the role of coup proofing on the effectiveness of militaries in the Middle East.” Castillo further called the volume “impressive.” Jessica L. P. Weeks, another contributor to the roundtable, described The Dictator’s Army as “an important book about an intriguing puzzle: why do some nondemocracies produce militaries that are effective on the battlefield, while others fail — or choose not — to translate their national assets into competent military organizations?” Talmadge, she said, “argues convincingly that the answer lies in the balance of internal and external threats faced by the incumbent regime.” Ryan Grauer, another participant in the roundtable, added that “Talmadge’s insightful and careful work offers a fresh and needed perspective in the literature on battlefield effectiveness, and it will deservedly play a key role in shaping the direction and substance of future work on the topic.”
Choice critic F.S. Pearson offered measured praise for The Dictator’s Army, characterizing it as “an intriguing study, but one perhaps hanging too exclusively on the question of coup proneness.” Journal of Politics reviewer Michael C. Horowitz, however, commended Talmadge enthusiastically. “Talmadge’s book makes a large theoretical contribution,” he observed. “Differentiating between internal and external threats substantially advances our understanding of how the security environment shapes the organizational choices that militaries make.” In Foreign Affairs, Lawrence D. Freedman commented positively on The Dictator’s Army as well, saying: “Talmadge backs up her compelling thesis with well-chosen, interesting case studies.” Castillo concluded: “Talmadge has written a terrific book that advances our understanding of military effectiveness. And it was a pleasure to read, something that is no small feat these days.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Air & Space Power Journal, January-February, 2013, Justin N. Theriot, review of U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy, p. 193.
Choice, April, 2016, F. S.Pearson, review of The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes, p. 1237.
Foreign Affairs, January-February, 2016, Lawrence D. Freedman, review of The Dictator’s Army.
International Relations, September, 2016, David M. Edelstein, review of The Dictator’s Army.
Journal of Politics, October, 2016, Michael C. Horowitz, review of The Dictator’s Army,
ONLINE
Caitlin Talmadge Home Page, http://www.caitlintalmadge.com (April 7, 2017).
George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs Web site, https://elliott.gwu.edu/ (April 7, 2017), brief biography.
International Security Studies Forum Web site, https://issforum.org/ (July 18, 2016), Jasen Castillo, Ryan Grauer, Dan Reiter, and Jessica L. P. Weeks, reviews of The Dictator’s Army, with response by Talmadge.*
CAITLIN TALMADGEThe George Washington UniversityMonroe Hall 466, 2115 G Street, NWWashington DC,20052CURRENT EMPLOYMENTTHE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITYAssistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, 2011-presentMember, Institute for Security &Conflict StudiesEDUCATIONTHE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGYPh.D., Political Science, 2011HARVARD COLLEGEA.B., summa cum laude, Government, 2003Phi Beta Kappa, 2002BOOKS&MONOGRAPH2017. U.S. Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy, thirdedition, with Harvey Sapolsky and Eugene Gholz (Routledge).2015. The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes(Cornell University Press).Winner of the 2017 Best Book Award, International Security Studies Section, International Studies AssociationNamed to Foreign Affairs’ “Best Books of 2016” ListReviewed in Foreign Affairs, Perspectives on Politics,Journal of Politics,Journal of Strategic Studies, H-Diplo Roundtable2006. U.S. Defense Mobilization in the Aftermath of a Nuclear Terrorist Attack(Cambridge, MA: The Long Term Strategy Project).PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES2017. “Civil-Military Pathologies and Defeat in War: Tests Using New Data,” with Vipin Narang, The Journal of Conflict Resolution(forthcoming).2017. “Assessing the Risk of Chinese Nuclear Escalation in a Conventional War with the United States,” International Security(forthcoming).2016. “Different Threats, Different Militaries: Explaining Organizational Practices in Authoritarian Armies,” Security Studies, 25(1), spring: 111-141. 2015. “When War Helps Civil-Military Relations: Prolonged Interstate Conflict and the Reduced Risk of CoupAttempts,” with Varun Piplani,Journal of Conflict Resolution(February):1-27.
Talmadge, p. 22014. “Hegemony, Force Posture, and the Provision of Public Goods: The Once and Future Role of Outside Powers in Securing Persian Gulf Oil,” with Joshua Rovner, Security Studies23(3), fall: 548-581.2013. “The Puzzle of Personalist Performance: Iraqi Battlefield Effectiveness in the Iran-Iraq War,” Security Studies, 22(2), spring: 180-221.2008. “Closing Time: Assessing Possible Outcomes of U.S.-Iranian Conflict in the Strait of Hormuz,” International Security, 33(1), summer: 82-117.2005. “Striking a Balance: the Lessons of U.S.-Russian Nuclear Materials Security Cooperation,” Non-Proliferation Review12(1): 1-35.CHAPTERS IN EDITED VOLUMES2017. “Too Much of a Good Thing? Conventional Military Effectiveness and the Danger of Nuclear Escalation,” in The Sword’s Other Edge: Trade-offs in Military Effectiveness, ed. Daniel Reiter (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).2016. “The Future of U.S. Force Posture in the Gulf: The Case for a Residual Forward Presence,” in Crude Strategy: Rethinking the U.S. Military Commitment to Defend Persian Gulf Oil, edited by Charles Glaser and Rose Kelanic (Georgetown University Press).WORK IN PROGRESSRisky Business: Nuclear Dangers in Conventional Wars(book manuscript). “Escalatory Alliances? The U.S. Presence in East Asia” (working paper). “The Escalation Implications of Emerging Technologies” (working paper).ADDITIONALSCHOLARLY WRITING2017. Review of Jasen Castillo, Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion, H-Diplo Roundtable, January 3. 2016. Response to Reviews of The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes, H-Diplo Roundtable,July 18. 2014. “Less Is More: The Future of the American Military in the Persian Gulf,” Washington Quarterly, 37(3),with Joshua Rovner. 2009. “Costs and Difficulties of Blocking the Strait of Hormuz,” correspondence with William D. O’Neil, International Security33(3), winter: 182-88. 2007. “Deterring a Nuclear 9/11,” Washington Quarterly30(2): 21-34.2006. “Transforming the Pentagon: McNamara, Rumsfeld, and the Politics of Change,” Breakthroughs15(1): 12-20.
Talmadge, p. 32002. “The Restrained Hegemon: the Political Limits of U.S. Military Power,” Harvard International Review, Fall 2002.SELECTED POPULAR WRITING2016. “Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of North Korea,” proceedings ofSouth Korean Army Research Institute Army Power Forum, Sogang University, June 21.2016. “Why Victory in Mosul Won’t Solve America’s Iraq Conundrum,” Lawfare blog post, with Joshua Rovner, April 10.2016. “Preventing Nuclear Escalation in U.S.-China Conflict,” U.S.-China Nuclear Project Policy Brief, GW Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, February.2015. “U.S. Perspectives on the Future of Asian Security,” in Next Generation Perspectives on the Future of Asian Security, ed. Aaron Friedberg (Washington, DC: The German MarshallFund Asia Policy Papers Series), with Zack Cooper, September 18.2015. “Why the U.S. (Still) Can’t Train the Iraqi Army,” The Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post, with Austin Long, September 22.2015. “The U.S. Leaked Its War Plan in Iraq. Why?” The Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post, with Joshua Rovner, February 27.2014. “What Would a New U.S. Military Look Like?” New York TimesRoom for Debate, July 14. 2014. “Why the Iraqi Army Collapsed (and what can be done about it),” The Monkey Cage Blog at the Washington Post, with Keren Fraiman and Austin Long, June 13.2013. “The U.S.-Japan Alliance in a Time of Transition,” with Sheena Chestnut Greitens, German Marshall Fund Policy Brief, July.2012. “Iran’s Dangerous Bluster over the Strait of Hormuz,” The Monkey Cage Blog at the Washington Post, January 5.2011. “What Defense Cuts?” Politico, with Benjamin H. Friedman, Sept. 19. 2010. “Under the Radar Rapprochement: Turkey and Iraqi Kurds,” ForeignPolicy.Com, with Mara Karlin, June 24.2009. “Winning in Afghanistan: It’s Not About Us,” Christian Science Monitor, October 1.2006. “F-22 Fighters Expensive, Unnecessary,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 15.2006. “War on Terror Bloats Defense Bill,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 4, with Benjamin Friedman.2006. “The QDR: Pentagon Should Put Money Where Its Mouth Is,” Baltimore Sun, February 10, with Benjamin Friedman.2005. “Don’t Count on Merkel to Defrost U.S.-German Relations,” European Voice, September 1.
Talmadge, p. 4FELLOWSHIPS,GRANTS,&AWARDSExternal Grants and Fellowships2016-2018Smith Richardson Junior Faculty Fellow2016-2018Carnegie Grant to Study U.S. Nuclear Strategy in Asia (withISCScolleagues)2015-2017Minerva Initiative Grant, U.S. Department of Defense (with ISCScolleagues)2014-15Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow, The Council on Foreign Relations2013-15Carnegie Grant to Study U.S. Nuclear Strategy in Asia (with ISCScolleagues)2009-2010APSA Centennial Center Visiting Scholar and Bryce Grant2009Smith Richardson Foundation World Politics & Statecraft Fellow2008-2009Brookings Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies2007-2008Olin Institute Pre-doctoral Fellow2005German Marshall Fund Manfred Wörner FellowInternal Grantsand Awards2015Elliott School Faculty Research FundGrant2014GWUFacilitating Fund Grant2012Policy Research Scholar, GW Institute of Public Policy 2011Elliott School FacultyResearch FundGrant2011ISCSGrant 2009MIT Center for International Studies Grant for Summer Research2008MIT Center for International Studies Grant for Summer Research2008Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Undergraduate Teaching2002Harvard Institute of Politics Directors’ Internship Grant1999-2003John Harvard Scholarship1999-2000Harvard College Detur PrizeINVITED TALKS&WORKSHOPS2017Massachusetts Institute of TechnologySeminar XXI(scheduled)2017Massachusetts Institute of Technology Frankel Congressional Seminar on Nuclear Security in the 21stCentury (scheduled)2017Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference (scheduled)2016Georgetown University, International Theory and Research Seminar2016University of Chicago, Program on International Security Policy2016National Intelligence Council, U.S. Department of State Analytic Exchange2016 Yale University, Conference on Conflict and Cooperation in the Nuclear Age2016 Sogang University of South Korea,Army Research Institute Army Power Forum2016Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Virginia, Project on Strategic Stability Evaluation, Workshop on Emerging Technologies2016The Council on Foreign Relations, Workshop on Oil Price Volatility
Talmadge, p. 52016Northwestern University, Buffett Institute for Global Studies2016Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Kissinger Institute on China and the United States2016Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Workshop on U.S. Extended Deterrence2015Southern Methodist University, Tower Center2015 China Institute of International Studies, China-U.S. Young Scholars Dialogue2015University of Maryland, Department of Government Doctoral Research Methods Seminar2015 Yale University, Workshop on Reconsidering the Role of Regime Type in International Relations2015Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratories,External Speaker Series2015U.S. Strategic Command, Deterrence Symposium2015Bruno Kessler Foundation, Workshop on Military Effectiveness2014U.S. Air War College, ExternalSpeaker Series2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Security StudiesProgramSpeaker Series2013Princeton University, Research Program in International Security2013 U.S. Naval War College, Current Strategy Forum2013Williams College,Undergraduate Summer Foreign Policy Institute2012University of Chicago, Program on International Security Policy2012University of Texas at Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs, Strauss Center Speaker Series2012U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group2012Duke University &the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, Conference on Civil-Military Relations2009Harvard University, National Security Studies Program2009U.S. Department of Defense, Combatting Terrorism Fellowship ProgramSELECTED PANELS &OTHER PRESENTATIONS“Assessing the Risk of Chinese Nuclear Escalation in a Conventional War with the United States.”GW Research in Progress Seminar April 2016; International Studies Association annual meeting,March 2016(panel organizer).“Civil-Military Pathology and Defeat in War: Tests Using New Data.”
Talmadge, p. 6International Studies Associationannual meetingMarch 2016(panel organizer); American Political Science Associationannual meeting, September2015.“Preventing Nuclear Escalation in Conventional Wars.” MIT Nuclear Security Working Group, September 29, 2015; Naval War College, September 2015; GW and Carnegie Conference on U.S. Strategic Nuclear Policy in Asia, September2015; American Political Science Associationannual meeting, September 2015(panel organizer); Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, May 2015; Nuclear Studies Research Initiative, May 2015; GW Researchin Progress Seminar, April 2015; Carnegie Workshop on U.S. Nuclear Strategy in Asia, December 2014; Stanton Nuclear SecurityFellowsConference, October2014.“Hegemony, Force Posture, and the Provision of Public Goods: The Once and Future Role of Outside Powers in Securing Persian Gulf Oil,” with Joshua Rovner. American Political Science Associationannual meeting, August 2014.“Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? Assessing the Future of U.S. Presence in the Persian Gulf.” American Political Science Associationannual meeting, August 29, 2013(panel organizer);American Political Science Association annual meeting, August 2012(panel organizer); GW Institute for Middle East Studies, February 19, 2013.“Does War Help Civil-Military Relations? Coup Attempts and InterstateConflict,” with Varun Piplani.Presented atthe American Political Science Associationannual meeting, August2014(panel organizer);American Political Science Associationannual meeting, August2013(panel organizer);GWMethodology Workshop, April2013; GW Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, April 2013.“Explaining Military Effectiveness.” International Studies Associationannual meeting, February 2010; American Political Science Associationannual meeting, September 2009; Georgetown University Department of Government and Security Studies Program, November 2009; American Political Science Associationannual meeting, August 2008; Olin Institute, Harvard University, March 2008.“Explaining Military Effectiveness: Political Intervention and Battlefield Performance in Iraq and Iran, 1980-1988.” International Studies Associationannual meeting, March 2011; London School of Economics, September2010. “Explaining Military Effectiveness: Political Intervention and Battlefield Performance in North and South Vietnam, 1962-1975.” International Studies Associationannual meeting, February 2010; GWU Department of Political Science February 2010; GWU Junior Faculty Working Group, July2010.“Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz.” U.S. Naval Academy, January 2009; American Political Science Associationannual meeting, August 2008; Gulf Energy Workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 2008; undergraduateguest lecture atDartmouth College, November 2007.“Deterring Nuclear Terrorism.” U.S. Army Operations & Technology Office, U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, March 2009.“U.S. Foreign Policy.”Discussant at American Political Science Associationannual meeting, September2009.
Talmadge, p. 7“Causes and Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation in the Middle East.” Roundtable at American Political Science Associationannual meeting, September2009.“Deterrence: New Dimensions and Debates.”Discussant at American Political Science Associationannual meeting, August 2008.TEACHINGPSC 1003: Introduction to International Relations (undergraduate)IAFF 6186: Nuclear Security (masters)IAFF 6160: Defense Policy and Program Analysis (masters)PSC 8489: Military Effectiveness (doctoral)SWAMOS: Summer Workshop on the Analysis of Military Operations and Strategy, Columbia and Cornell(20 graduate students and universityfaculty), 2014, 2015, 2016DOCTORAL ADVISINGJacquelyn Schneider (research committee; completed 2017)Dorothy Ohl (research committee; completed 2016)Inwook Kim (research committee; completed2015)Toby Dalton (outside reader; completed2015)PROFESSIONAL SERVICE &ASSOCIATIONAssociate Editor, International Security Studies Forum, H-Diplo, 2016-2019Book Manuscript Workshops, Yale University, September 2015; GW, September 2016Reviewer, American Political Science Review, International Security, Security Studies, American Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Review of Policy Research, Terrorism and Political Violence, World Politics, Research & Politics, Journal of Global Security Studies, Journal of Strategic StudiesMember, American Political Science Association, International Studies Association,The Council on Foreign Relations,Women in International Security, Tobin Project, GW Nuclear Security Working Group, Center for a New American Security Next Generation National Security Leaders, American-Israeli Academic Exchange, German Marshall Fund Young Strategists Forum, Project 2049 Delegation to Taiwan, China-U.S. Young Scholars DialogueOTHER PROFESSIONALEXPERIENCEResearch Associate, Seminar XXI Program, 2009-2011
Talmadge, p. 8Designed curriculum for MIT executive education program bringing social science research to senior national security professionals. Supervised by Professor Robert Art of Brandeis.Research Assistant, MIT Department of Political Science, 2004-2007Conducted research and writing on U.S. military innovation, revolution in military affairs, defense acquisition for Professor Harvey Sapolskyand Professor Barry Posen.Analyst, The Long-Term Strategy Project, summer 2006Produced monograph for Department of Defense. Research Assistant, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2003-2004Conducted research and writing on nuclear and conventional defense issuesfor Senior Fellow Michèle Flournoy. Helped plan scenario-based nuclear terrorism exercise in Brussels. Tutor, various volunteer programs, Boston, MA, and Washington, DC, 1999-2001, 2003-2004, 2010.Taught adults and children in local community each week in variety of subjects.Updated February2017
Caitlin Talmadge
Title:
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs
Office:
Room 466
Address: Monroe Hall
2115 G Street, NW
Phone: 202-994-7591
Fax: 202-994-7743
Email:
ct2@gwu.edu
Website:
caitlintalmadge.com
Areas of Expertise
Defense policy; civil-military relations; military operations; nuclear strategy; and Persian Gulf security issues.
Background
Caitlin Talmadge is a graduate of Harvard (A.B., summa cum laude) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D.), and has held fellowships from the Olin Institute at Harvard University, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Brookings Institution, and the American Political Science Association. Prior to graduate school, she worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She also has previously served as a consultant to the Office of Net Assessment at the U.S. Department of Defense and was named a Next Generation National Security Leader by the Center for a New American Security in 2009.
Education
A.B., Harvard College
Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Classes Taught
PSC 1003 Introduction to International Politics
IAFF 6160 Defense Policy and Program Analysis
CAITLIN TALMADGE
Assistant Professor of Political Science & International Affairs
The George Washington University
I am an assistant professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University, where I am also a member of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies. My research focuses on civil-military relations, military effectiveness, defense policy, nuclear strategy, and Persian Gulf security issues. My most recent book is The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Cornell University Press, 2015). I am currently writing a book on the risk of nuclear escalation in conventional wars.
The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes
Picture
Cornell University Press, 2015
Named to Foreign Affairs' "Best Books of 2016" List
Winner of the 2017 Best Book Award,
International Security Studies Section, International Studies Association
Quoted in Sidelights: Talmadge backs up her compelling thesis with well-chosen, interesting case studies.
Military, scientific, and technological
Lawrence D. Freedman
Foreign Affairs. 95.1 (January-February 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org
The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes
BY CAITLIN TALMADGE. Cornell University Press, 2015, 320 pp.
Military analysts and historians have long held that variations in political systems can affect military effectiveness. For example, authoritarian systems tend to be bolder than democracies; for that reason, authoritarian leaders are more prone to strategic error. In line with other scholars who have recently examined this issue, Talmadge distinguishes between authoritarians who are able to focus unremittingly on the enemy and those who must watch their backs at home. If political leaders are fearful of military coups, they tend to interfere with command structures to prevent the rise of charismatic and ambitious generals. The resulting disruption and uncertainty undermine military performance, especially during complex operations. Talmadge backs up her compelling thesis with well-chosen, interesting case studies. During the Iran-Iraq War, she explains, regimes in both countries worried about coups. Iraq's Saddam Hussein was simply paranoid by nature; Iranian leaders feared that the military still housed loyalists to the shah, whom they had only recently overthrown. Both countries' armies performed better when political leaders put aside such concerns and concentrated on the war.
Quoted in Sidelights: An intriguing study, but one perhaps hanging too exclusively on the question of coup proneness
Talmadge, Caitlin. The dictator's army: battlefield effectiveness in authoritarian regimes
F.S. Pearson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1237.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Talmadge, Caitlin. The dictator's army: battlefield effectiveness in authoritarian regimes. Cornell, 2015. 304p index afp ISBN 9780801453472 cloth, $79.95; ISBN 9781501700293 pbk, $26.95
53-3721
JC480
2015-7580 CIP
Talmadge (George Washington Univ.) sets out to account for battlefield successes and failures in armies of authoritarian regimes. She concentrates on the threat environment, utilizing resourceful documentary analysis to distinguish situations where regimes fear coups from regimes where the primary perception of threat is external. She hypothesizes and finds that coup potential leads to less successful battlefield organization (basic and advanced tactics) in interstate warfare. Four regimes in two conflicts are studied: North vs. South Vietnam (1950s-70s) and Iran vs. Iraq (1980s warfare). Without quantitative models, however, readers are left with the impression that interpretations somewhat conform to the authors prior expectations and neglect alternate explanations. Readers might hope for comparison to cases of coup potential in democracies (e.g., Greece), and for independent measures of internal corruption. Statements such as "Iran's territorial gains would have been possible only against an opponent such as Iraq" have an air of counterfactual analysis. To attribute Iraqi successes just before the 1988 ceasefire to better tactical decisions also begs the question of external military assistance from major powers during the Iran-Iraq War and the ongoing US embargo against Iran. An intriguing study, but one perhaps hanging too exclusively on the question of coup proneness. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--F. S. Pearson, Wayne State University
Quoted in Sidelights: relevant and worthwhile
Specifically, I recommend it to all senior noncommissioned officers and junior officers as well as to other service members who desire a fundamental understanding of how politics affects the military.
US Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy
Justin N. Theriot
Air & Space Power Journal. 27.1 (January-February 2013): p193.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Air Force Research Institute
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/
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Full Text:
US Defense Politics: The Origins of Security Policy by Harvey M. Sapolsky, Eugene Gholz, and Caitlin Talmadge. Routledge (http:// www.routledge.com), 270 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016, 2009, 191 pages, $178.00 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-415-77265-5; 2009, 191 pages, $44.95 (softcover), ISBN 978-0-415-77266-2.
In US Defense Politics, Prof. Harvey Sapolsky of MIT, Prof. Eugene Gholz of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin, and PhD candidate Caitlin Talmadge of MIT provide a detailed look into politics affecting our national defense. The authors offer a brief history lesson on the military before addressing four questions characteristic of US policy making: "(1) What shall be the division between public and private responsibilities in each particular policy area? (2) What shall be the division between planning and the market? (3) What is to be centralized and what is to be decentralized in each policy area? (4) And what questions should be settled by experts, on technocratic grounds, and what should be settled by political means, representing the will of the people?" (p. 8).
Sapolsky, Gholz, and Talmadge express a need for blending private and public responsibilities in a manner that benefits both the government and its citizens. For example, though specifically designed for the military, the Global Positioning System has proven even more useful to civilians. The authors argue that more such mutually beneficial acquisitions would ease any political turmoil with regard to the necessary research and development.
As for planning and the market, US Defense Politics examines a free-market approach to US defense, pointing out, for instance, objections raised by the other military services to the Air Force's desire to control the development of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA). The authors indicate that such a stranglehold on the RPA market adversely affects the mission due to a lack of competition. Instead, "[RPA] development across multiple services would be more conducive to innovation and would create a more diverse set of capabilities for the future" (p. 160).
Addressing the question of centralization and decentralization within the defense structure, the authors note that in times of conflict, centralization is paramount, insofar as two power pyramids exist: the military, acting as an adviser, and civilians, implementing policy. Having each power in a defined role allows top leadership to effectively carry out the mission of defending our nation. Decentralization, however, "encourages the development and presentation of new ideas, but it does not encourage the implementation of any" (p. 163). Ultimately, after the military branches compete with each other, civilian leadership considers their ideas and then decides which path to choose, thus reaffirming the need for centralization: "What is unproductive is to divide the DOD up into civilian versus military camps, between an administration-dominated corps on the one hand and the permanent bureaucracy on the other" (p. 164).
Lastly, the book points out that determining whether to have experts or politicians settle certain questions actually involves a balance of power. For example, whereas defense experts argue the need for sturdier tanks, faster aircraft, or larger ships, politicians realize that other initiatives, such as providing medical service for military family members, would have a more productive effect on the overall capability of national defense. Consequently, in this instance, authorizing less expensive fifth-generation tanks, aircraft, or ships allows for a stronger all-volunteer force.
Emphasizing the importance of maintaining harmony between the civilian and military arenas as a factor in defense politics, the authors single out Robert McNamara as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history. One need only examine statements by the former secretary to discover a lack of this desired cohesiveness: "I see my position here as being that of a leader, not a judge. I am here to originate and stimulate new ideas and programs, not just to referee arguments and harmonize interests" (p. 100).
Regrettably, the book does have its flaws. Take, for example, the section on President George W. Bush, the Iraq war, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD): "No WMD were found, not even a warehouse or two full of chemical shells, which nearly every intelligence around the world had believed existed" (p. 143). Since this book is about defense politics, the authors should have examined more carefully the background of intelligence reports. Even though intelligence agencies continuously reported the lack of evidence necessary to provide legal grounds for an invasion of Iraq, politicians in Washington pressured the analysts into producing vague reports that one could read either way. After all, in some cases, such as this one, politicians interpret intelligence reports as they see fit and then create policies.
All things considered, US Defense Politics is relevant and worthwhile for the Air Force community. Specifically, I recommend it to all senior noncommissioned officers and junior officers as well as to other service members who desire a fundamental understanding of how politics affects the military. The fact that each of the 12 chapters includes questions for discussion and recommendations for additional reading makes it a valuable tool for mentors who are developing the leaders of tomorrow.
SSgt Justin N. Theriot, USAF
Incirlik AB, Turkey
Theriot, Justin N.
Quoted in Sidelights, from Talmadge’s portion.
In The Dictator’s Army I sought to make sense of variation in military performance that is puzzling from the perspective of existing theories—particularly variation in military effectiveness across different units of the same military or in the same military over time. Such variation is hard to explain if military power is a function of fairly static factors such as national wealth or culture. … Ultimately, my goal was to offer a framework that could help scholars studying military performance, as well as policymakers seeking to assess or influence it in the real world.
From Castillo’s: Two of the many contributions that the Dictator’s Army makes to the study of military effectiveness strike me
as particularly important. First, the book provides a comprehensive list of the organizational practices that are
logically and empirically linked to skill on the conventional battlefield.
Second, the book’s theory puts flesh on the bones of James Quinlivan’s original insights into the role of coup
proofing on the effectiveness of militaries in the Middle East. Talmadge has written a terrific book that advances our understanding of military
effectiveness. And it was a pleasure to read, something that is no small feat
these days.
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Review by Jasen Castillo, Texas A&M University
Why do states vary in their ability to create and to field militaries capable of performing well on
modern battlefields? In the field of security studies, few questions trump this one in terms of
importance. The question gets to the heart of how to measure military power. Traditional
estimates of military power focus on things we can count, like troops, tanks, ships, and aircraft. Any full
picture of military power, however, requires some assessment of how well people will perform in battle with
the material capabilities they possess.
Caitlin Talmadge’s impressive book, The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes,
offers a compelling answer to this important question. When militaries adopt the correct set of organizational
practices (real, frequent training; merit promotion; decentralized command; and open communication), they
stand a better chance of succeeding in battle. Why do all states not adopt these practices? This book argues
that the balance between internal and external threats determines whether regimes allow their militaries to
embrace these organizational characteristics. In particular, fear of a coup will prevent governments from doing
what it takes to win on the modern battlefield.
The central argument in a nutshell is that “regimes facing significant coup threats are unlikely to adopt
military practices optimized for conventional combat, even when doing so might help them prevail in
conflicts against other states (or even to combat other types of internal threats, such as conventional civil wars
or insurgencies)” (2). Although the book’s theory could apply to any country regardless of regime type,
Talmadge focuses on authoritarian states. (12).
Supporting evidence for this persuasive argument comes from two detailed and well-organized case studies.
The first case study pairs Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Revolutionary Iran during their bloody conflict in
the 1980s. In a second case, Talmadge examines the military performance of North Vietnam and South
Vietnam from 1963 to 1975. The selection of these cases allows Talmadge to control for several potential
intervening variables, while also giving her the opportunity to trace in detail the causal logic of her theory.
Case studies allow Talmadge to unpack the processes at work in each country, connecting military
performance to a regime’s worries about internal security.
Coup prevention was a priority in most of these countries except North Vietnam, which, as the theory would
predict, fielded a military with excellent battlefield performance. Iraq improved its combat effectiveness late in
the war by removing coup prevention measures on key units. Similarly, only the unencumbered 1st Division
of the South Vietnamese military could perform well in combat, while other Army of the Republic of
Vietnam (ARVN) units suffered from not following the practices required for success in conventional combat.
Finally, Iranian forces initially did well until the regime’s revolutionary zeal and concern about military coups
eventually hampered training and performance.
Two of the many contributions that the Dictator’s Army makes to the study of military effectiveness strike me
as particularly important. First, the book provides a comprehensive list of the organizational practices that are
logically and empirically linked to skill on the conventional battlefield. These allow militaries to do well in
W
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what Stephen Biddle labels the “Modern System.”1 His work lays out the demands of modern warfare. Simply
put, Biddle explains what military units must do to succeed in war. Talmadge explains why some states can or
cannot follow the recipe. For scholars, knowing the precise steps a military organization must implement to
do well in this ‘modern system’ represents a significant contribution to understanding the sources of effective
combat performance. Military planners can also use this insight when they craft net assessments of potential
adversaries. The next step is to see if the book’s theory can apply beyond military dictatorships. This would
also help us get away from the stale debate over regime type and military effectiveness.
Second, the book’s theory puts flesh on the bones of James Quinlivan’s original insights into the role of coup
proofing on the effectiveness of militaries in the Middle East.2 Quinivan wrote his article because Iraq’s poor
performance in the First Persian Gulf War seemed puzzling. Building on this work, The Dictator’s Army
presents a complete theory with scope conditions and causal logic explaining the effects that different coup
proofing practices have on battlefield performance. Because she spends time building a coherent theory,
Talmadge can offer interesting insights into the relationships between regimes and their armed forces. For
example, she distinguishes between the detrimental interference of Saddam Hussein on Iraq’s battlefield
performance from the less harmful political meddling of Germany’s dictator, Adolf Hitler, on the
Werhmacht.
Like any good work in the social sciences, this book also raises a number of questions that could drive future
research. I see four issues worth further investigation. None of these detract from the volume. On the
contrary, the clarity of the book allows us to think about where the debate should go next.
First, how much coup proofing impedes performance? Put another way: how many of these organizational
practices do militaries need in order to do well on the battlefield? Talmdage gives us a list of necessary
practices but it seems possible that some of them are more important than others when it comes to battlefield
performance. A government’s fear of a coup might lead it to adopt some protection practices but not others.
Regimes likely cross some threshold where their interference begins to impede military effectiveness. Instances
of ‘mild’ coup protection would likely result in a mixed performance on the battlefield. Similarly, there is
likely a threshold where too much coup protection has taken place for a regime to reverse course and to undo
the damage in a time of war, like Saddam Hussein’s decision during the Iran-Iraq War. Perhaps testing the
theory beyond dictatorships—in more mixed regimes-- could shed light on some of these threshold issues.
Second, what is the role of motivation, morale, and unit cohesion in the organizational practices outlined in
the book’s theory? The book focuses on the skills required for success on the conventional battlefield, but
what about will? A large literature exists pointing to the importance of morale on the battlefield. Some
militaries can often compensate for a lack of material by fighting with more determination in combat.3 Biddle
1 Stephen Biddle’s Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004).
2 James T. Quinlivan, “Coup-proofing: Its Practice and Consequence in the Middle East,” International
Security 24:2 (Fall 1999), 131-165.
3 Hew Strachan, “Training, Morale and Modern War,” Journal of Contemporary History 41:2 (2006); 211-227;
and, Nora Kinzer Stewart, Mates and Muchachos: Unit Cohesion in the Falklands/Malvinas War (Washington: Brassey’s
Inc., 1991). John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France,
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argues that small-unit cohesion is a key ingredient to success in the modern system. My suspicion is that the
organizational practices Talmadge identifies as essential for fighting effectively also contribute to morale and
unit cohesion, but these are not the only sources of military motivation. Separating skill from will is a tricky
business, but nevertheless, how coup proofing might effect combat motivation is a crucial question.
Third, and related to the previous question, what other coup protection practices might regimes adopt to
safeguard their survival without undermining battlefield performance? The history of Nazi Germany suggests
three practices that a dictator might choose. One simple strategy would entail coopting the armed forces by
developing a common set of interests. The German officer corps may not have loved Hitler’s populist
message, but they embraced his goals of national rearmament and territorial expansion.4 Inculcating the
military and the society with the regime’s ideology is another way of increasing loyalty to the regime, while
also generating combat power.5 Finally, creating parallel military organizations can both protect the regime
and allow the military to fight with great effectiveness on the battlefield. Although the Waffen SS varied in its
fighting performance early in the Second World War, by the later years of the conflict it represented some of
the best equipped, determined, and proficient units of the German military. Parallel military organizations
also excel at applying coercion to the regular armed forces as well as the general population to keep both
fighting, instruments that ensured the survival of the Soviet state against the German onslaught of 1941-
1942.
Last, what are the other hurdles that might prevent a military from adopting what Talmadge identifies as the
key organizational practices to succeed on the modern battlefield? The book takes it as axiomatic that all
militaries would adopt these practices if the regimes let them do so. Still, I wonder if all military organizations
are up to the challenge. The Dictator’s Army concedes that militaries might make bad choices. I can think of a
few possibilities that would prevent military organizations from adopting the right practices. Consider, for
example, the Italian military before World War II as described by the historian MacGregor Knox. He lists all
kinds of reasons for its subpar performance, but they key ones include class divisions, poor relations between
the military and society, and tensions between officers and enlisted personnel.6 Most of these issues had little
to do with coup protection.
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These organizational pathologies also plagued the French armed forces from 1870 to 1940. At the same time,
the politicians of France’s Third Republic also worried that the military might intervene in politics. Although
not a dictator’s army, the French example is instructive since Talmadge’s theory should apply beyond
authoritarian regimes. Despite ever-present coup fears, and a steady stream of problems within the
organization, the French military put in a mixed performance: fighting persistently in the Franco-Prussian
War, fighting well in the First World War, but fighting terribly in in 1940.
Despite these questions, this Talmadge has written a terrific book that advances our understanding of military
effectiveness. And it was a pleasure to read, something that is no small feat
these days.
Quoted in Sidelights: Talmadge’s insightful and careful work offers a fresh and needed perspective in the literature on battlefield
effectiveness, and it will deservedly play a key role in shaping the direction and substance of future work on
the topic.
Review by Ryan Grauer, University of Pittsburgh
Battlefield effectiveness, given its impact on the course and nature of world politics, is arguably one of
the most understudied topics in international relations. Despite a literature that has burgeoned
impressively over the past several years, there are a vast number of questions to which we simply do
not yet have good answers. Caitlin Talmadge has identified a number of such questions and, in this book,
makes a signal contribution to scholarly understandings of why some militaries are better able to translate the
men and materiel they possess into actual combat power.
One of the most prominent questions in the literature on battlefield effectiveness is whether, and how,
particular regime characteristics might influence armed forces’ performance in combat. To date, investigations
of this question have largely focused on the role that regime type plays in this regard. Some scholars argue
that, for a variety of institutional and sociopolitical reasons, armed forces fielded by democracies tend to fight
better than do those mustered by non-democracies.1 Others contest the point, suggesting that particular case
codings or other variables that are often correlated with democratic governance may be driving the finding.2
No matter which argument is correct, this focus on regime type as a driver of martial capability is inherently
limited. Even if the militaries of democratic regimes do tend to perform better on the battlefield, that
knowledge does not help us understand variation in the capabilities of belligerent forces in the more than 50
percent of wars fought between 1816 and 2007 in which no democracy was involved.3 Nor does it assist
analysts who are interested in forecasting the likely strength of non-democratic belligerents in potential future
wars. Understanding whether regime characteristics condition martial performance writ large requires
knowing more than how political elites gain and lose power.
Therein lays Talmadge’s primary contribution to the literature on battlefield effectiveness. Though her
examination of the way in which different types of authoritarian regimes generate martial capability is both
welcome and needed, Talmadge’s insistence that we focus on regime strength rather than regime type when
thinking about drivers of battlefield effectiveness is much more important. Ruling elites in all types of regimes
can be more and less firmly ensconced; some face almost no internal or external threats to their positon and
place, others must fend off assaults from multiple quarters, and many fall in between. Democratic and nondemocratic
elites alike, when facing relatively more significant challenges to their authority (real or imagined),
1 Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
2 Stephen D. Biddle and Stephen Long, “Democracy and Military Effectiveness: A Deeper Look,” Journal of
Conflict Resolution 48:4 (August 2004): 525-546; Michael C. Desch, Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of
Democratic Triumphalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Alexander B. Downes, “How Smart and
Tough Are Democracies? Reassessing Theories of Democratic Victory in War,” International Security 33:4 (April 2009):
9–51; Michael Beckley, “Economic Development and Military Effectiveness,” Journal of Strategic Studies 33:1 (February
2010): 43-79.
3 Meredith Reid Sarkees and Frank W. Wayman, Resort to War: 1816-2007 (Thousand Oaks: CQ Press, 2010);
Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Polity IV Annual Time Series 1800-2011, version p4v2012 (College Park: Center
for Systemic Peace, 2012), http://systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm.
B
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will naturally seek to do two things: bolster institutions that can be used to protect themselves and weaken
those that could be employed by would-be usurpers.
Focusing on regime strength should inform our understandings of belligerents’ battlefield effectiveness
because, as Talmadge convincingly argues, the means by which ruling elites under threat strengthen their own
hand and weaken that of their most powerful opponents have different implications for their militaries’
capabilities. Elites facing strong external threats but few or no internal challenges are likely to work to increase
their armed forces capacities to use men and materiel effectively in combat. Specifically, she notes, they will
work to ensure that officers are promoted on merit rather than political connections; soldier training is
thorough and realistic; command and control structures are unified and rationally organized; and information
management protocols facilitate the swift movement of data and news throughout the force. The relatively
pacific domestic environment allows such elites to rest easy in the knowledge that their militaries’ resultant
tactical and operational strength – so necessary to ensure the national defense – is unlikely to be turned
against them.
By contrast, Talmadge argues, elites facing strong internal threats and few significant external challenges are
likely to undermine their militaries’ tactical and operational capabilities by privileging political loyalty over
competence in the selection and promotion of officers, minimizing soldier training, creating multiple and
tangled chains of command, and complicating intra-military communication. Doing so makes it harder for
militaries to launch coups on their own or serve as an effective tool for oppositional civilian elites in their
efforts to depose those in power. That the resultant forces are likely to be ineffective and weak in traditional
combat is relatively unimportant, since the paucity of external threats reduces the chances that they will be
called on to fight in such a manner. Elites facing mixed internal and external threats are likely to pursue one
of two tracks: they may either work to tailor the military such that it addresses what they deem the most
pressing (usually internal) threat and hope for the best with the respect to the other (typically external)
challenge, or create a mixed force in which the bulk of the military is structured so that it poses little internal
threat and some select units are bolstered so that they are capable of performing effectively on conventional
battlefields.
Talmadge tests her argument in two paired comparisons: a series of battles fought by North and South
Vietnam between 1963 and 1975, and a series of battles fought between Iran and Iraq during their 1980-
1988 war. The case studies are well-chosen. They offer considerable variation on the dependent variable –
battlefield effectiveness – and, within the paired comparisons, hold relatively constant a variety of factors
which are often cited as potential drivers of combat performance, including national population and wealth,
regime type, and culture. The cases also cover some of the lesser-examined forces and battles in the battlefield
effectiveness literature and, as such, add to scholars’ collective stock of empirical knowledge on the topic.
Finally, the studies are very well-executed. Talmadge draws on an array of primary and secondary sources,
some only newly available, to present detailed, nuanced descriptions of events and causal processes.
The evidence marshaled generally offers strong support for Talmadge’s theory. In Vietnam, for example, the
North’s ruling elites feared little domestic challenge, having consolidated their one-party rule over the decade
preceding the first of the examined battles, while the South’s various ruling elites could not be sure that theirs
would not be the next in a long line of governments to fall to a coup. The North’s internal stability permitted
president Ho Chi Minh and his coterie to promote conventional warfighting capabilities in their various
military organizations and, as expected, the resultant meritocratic promotion policies, rigorous training,
rationalized command and control, and relatively easy intra-military communication helped those forces
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perform effectively on a consistent basis. The South’s domestic turmoil, by contrast, led President Ngo Dinh
Diem and his successors to largely undermine their army’s conventional warfighting capabilities. The majority
of units in South Vietnam’s army were poorly trained, led by officers installed for their political rather than
military qualities, subject to direction through tangled and centralized chains of command, and relatively
isolated from contact with other units. They consequently performed abysmally in the field. An exception,
however, was 1st Division. That unit, stationed furthest from Saigon and closest to North Vietnam, posed
relatively little threat to the regime and needed to be strong to serve as a first line of defense. It was afforded
many of the advantages North Vietnam gave its forces and, very often, fought well.
The Iran-Iraq War similarly bolsters confidence in Talmadge’s claim, though it does so with a twist. Neither
the Iranian nor the Iraqi leadership felt secure during the war and, as a consequence, both generally adopted
policies and practices that undermined their militaries’ conventional warfighting effectiveness. Iran performed
better than Iraq at the outset of the war, however, because many of its regular forces still enjoyed the lingering
benefits of the leadership and training the Shah afforded them prior to the 1979 revolution. That competence
eroded over time, and by 1982, the Iranians regularly failed to exhibit basic tactical proficiency or execute
complex operations. Iraq, by contrast, exhibited marked tactical and operational improvement late in the war
after having struggled to fight well for six years. Talmadge shows that this change can be traced to Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein altering his threat calculus. In particular, Saddam increasingly feared growing
domestic threats stemming largely from the military's dissatisfaction with how the external threat posed by
Iran was being managed and, to alleviate the pressure, grudgingly permitted improvements in officership,
training, command arrangements, and information management in the Republican Guard and some regular
army units.
Talmadge’s insightful theoretical move and compelling empirical work combine to make a powerful
argument. Strong as it is, however, a few questions remain. First, with respect to Talmadge’s dependent
variable, I am not fully persuaded that the conceptualization of battlefield effectiveness presented in the book
is the most appropriate one. Talmadge follows what increasingly seems to be standard practice in the literature
by defining her dependent variable as a “property intrinsic to a particular military or military units”
measurable in terms of how well armed forces perform basic tactics and carry out complex operations (4).4 At
the risk of seeming pedantic, this understanding seems much more akin to battlefield efficiency than battlefield
effectiveness. As the term is conventionally used, an actor operating in a social setting is described as effective
when it achieves its intended objective vis-à-vis others. An effective teacher, for example, is one who
successfully helps his or her students learn. An effective advertising company is one that successfully convinces
the public to purchase its clients’ products. What are militaries’ intended battlefield objectives? Few, if any,
armed forces are tasked with simply to mastering basic tactics and capably conducting complex operations.
Rather, they are meant to achieve a wide array of things on the battlefield, from waging a fighting withdrawal
to complete destruction of enemy forces. An effective military would thus be one that succeeds in carrying out
its assigned tasks and, ideally, preventing its adversary from doing the same. Tactical and operational
proficiency are often required to do so, but such capabilities are better thought of in terms of efficiency, like a
teacher’s skill in stretching his or her ever-declining budget when purchasing classroom supplies or an
4 This kind of operationalization is premised on the argument advanced in Allan Reed Millett, Williamson
Murray, and Kenneth H. Watman, “The Effectiveness of Military Organizations,” in Military Effectiveness 1 (Boston:
Unwin Hyman, 1988), 2-3.
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advertising company’s capacity to find inexpensive and innovative ways to boost brand recognition, rather
than effectiveness: factors that are helpful in achieving, but not quite the same as, the intended end.5
Accordingly, I would propose that battlefield effectiveness is better understood as a property of the
relationship between engaged forces and is measurable in terms of whether or not those forces achieve their
intended objectives in combat. Functionally, substituting this understanding of battlefield effectiveness for
tactical and operational proficiency does not change Talmadge’s analysis or conclusions in any real way; by
my reading of the evidence presented, assessments of effectiveness in North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese,
Iraqi, and Iranian forces would stay largely the same, save perhaps in the fighting at Hue in 1968. It would,
however, draw the conceptualization of battlefield effectiveness closer to conventional understandings of the
term, preclude conflating efficiency and effectiveness, and, to the extent that tactical and operational
proficiency are thought to be significant achievements in their own right, provide a clearer way of thinking
about such capabilities moving forward.
Second, setting aside questions about how the dependent variable is operationalized, it remains somewhat
unclear how we should think about the four causal mechanisms posited to connect regime strength with
battlefield effectiveness. As noted, Talmadge argues that variation in the quality and nature of threats to ruling
elites will shape their policies regarding militaries’ promotion patterns, training regimens, command
arrangements, and information management, and the specific policies adopted in these issue areas will then
condition forces’ battlefield effectiveness. Why these four specific issue areas should be the primary
mechanisms through which elites condition effectiveness, and how they might interact with and relate to one
another, is not immediately clear. Talmadge notes they are “most logically central to combat capability” and
“tell us a great deal about the likely tactical and operational fighting power a given army is likely to generate”
(13). This may be true, but is each equally important? Are policies facilitating the smooth functioning or
impeding the operation of all four necessary for excellent or poor battlefield effectiveness? Even if deductively
ideal policies are needed in all four areas to ensure high levels of battlefield effectiveness in conventional
combat operations, could insecure elites manipulate policies in only one or two areas and both eliminate the
threat the military poses to their regime and undermine its conventional effectiveness? Can good or poor
policies in one or two issue areas trump the effect of good or bad policies in the other areas?
Intuitively, it seems that focusing on training patterns and command arrangements would tell us virtually all
we need to know about militaries’ capacities to perform basic tactics and conduct complex operations. To wit,
it is hard to imagine a situation in which a military with promotion patterns, command arrangements, and
information management structured to facilitate conventional warfighting would score well in terms of basic
tactical competence if training regimens were not similarly rationalized. Conversely, with thorough and
rigorous training, even politically connected but incompetent officers, centralized control, and inferior
information management capabilities should not significantly hamper forces’ capacities to handle weapons
and use terrain for cover and concealment. Similarly, command arrangements seem key to capacities to carry
out complex operations; if competent commanders leading well-trained troops that can communicate easily
are not permitted the authority to act on their own initiative, then it will be quite difficult for units to rapidly
5 On the distinction between efficiency and effectiveness in organizations, see Martin Landau, “Redundancy,
Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and Overlap,” Public Administration Review 29:4 (August 1969): 346-358;
Charles Perrow, Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay (New York: Random House, 1986); Karlene H. Roberts, “Some
Characteristics of One Type of High Reliability Organization,” Organization Science 1:2 (May 1990): 160-176.
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execute context-sensitive combined and joint actions with one another. It may be, and likely is the case, that
policies regarding and the quality of militaries’ arrangements in the four issue areas that Talmadge identifies
tend to covary. But that does not necessarily mean that they are equally important in conditioning levels of
battlefield effectiveness. Especially for scholars and policymakers seeking to apply the important insights of
this book more widely, is it imperative that they engage in the kind of laborious, detailed informationgathering
process underpinning the empirical work presented in this book, or are the values of some indicator
variables more important to get right than others?
Finally, especially in the Iran-Iraq War case, it seems that at least one factor beyond the balance of internal
and external threats – ideology – may play an important role in shaping elites’ policies on military matters.
Talmadge’s interpretation of the dynamics of that conflict are convincing in explaining why, even though
elites in both states feared internal threats, Iran was more effective on the battlefield early in the war and Iraq
fought better toward the end. One question not fully addressed, however, is why Iranian leadership did not
make the same calculated gamble that Saddam did in order to bolster its capabilities and win the war early on
when it was already advantaged. Iran, as Talmadge points out, benefited from the lingering impact of the
Shah’s more rational military policies in the early part of the war, but that edge waned over time. Talmadge
attributes this change in Iranian battlefield effectiveness to a plane crash that killed Iran’s few competent
commanders and the fact that the leadership in Tehran learned the wrong lessons from the first two years of
the war. The first factor could not be helped, but the reasons why the Iranian regime credited the newly
created revolutionary forces with the decisive effort rather than the regular forces merits some additional
consideration. It is possible that the Iranian leadership made this choice because they felt less threatened by a
force more obviously loyal to the regime, but the logic underpinning such calculus is fundamentally
ideological at its core; the congruence in the regime’s and the revolutionary forces’ religious and political
fervor would have driven the decision. It is also possible that ideology played a more naked role, and that
Tehran believed that the revolutionary forces, by virtue of their passion and motivation, were necessarily
superior to regular forces in spite of promotion, training, command arrangement, and information
management policies that depressed their conventional warfighting capabilities. In either case, something
beyond the nature and intensity of threats posed to the regime drove its policymaking vis-à-vis the Iranian
military. Even if the role of ideology in shaping elite decision making in Iran is a substantive outlier, a clearer
understanding of how to handle the many non-rational factors that influence decision making would help
readers define the set of cases to which Talmadge’s model might be usefully applied.
These questions are, on the whole, relatively minor quibbles with what is in the end a very good book.
Talmadge’s insightful and careful work offers a fresh and needed perspective in the literature on battlefield
effectiveness, and it will deservedly play a key role in shaping the direction and substance of future work on
the topic.
Quoted in Sidelights: an important book about an intriguing puzzle: why do some nondemocracies
produce militaries that are effective on the battlefield, while others fail – or choose not –
to translate their national assets into competent military organizations?
argues convincingly that the answer lies in the balance of internal and external threats faced by the
incumbent regime.
Review by Jessica L.P. Weeks, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Caitlin Talmadge has written an important book about an intriguing puzzle: why do some nondemocracies
produce militaries that are effective on the battlefield, while others fail – or choose not –
to translate their national assets into competent military organizations?
Talmadge argues convincingly that the answer lies in the balance of internal and external threats faced by the
incumbent regime. Governments fearing military coups have incentives to organize their militaries in ways
that minimize that threat, with severe costs to conventional military effectiveness. Regimes whose bigger
concern is an external enemy (whether foreign, or in the form of a mass domestic uprising) will instead tend
to pursue best practices in military organization: they will adopt promotion patterns that prioritize
competence over political loyalty, allow their units to train extensively, implement decentralized and clear
command arrangements, and encourage extensive vertical and horizontal communication within the military.
By focusing on the balance between internal and external threats, Talmadge is able to generate predictions not
only across regimes, but also within the same regime over time or even across different units in the same
country; this focus on within-regime variation is a particularly exciting aspect of the theory. The book is a
major addition to the burgeoning literature on the behavior of not just states, but the political actors (regimes
and leaders) within them when it comes to decisions bearing on military effectiveness and foreign policy more
generally.1
The book’s empirical focus is on two sets of carefully paired cases: North and South Vietnam during the
Vietnam War, and Iran and Iraq during their bloody eight-year conflict. Talmadge argues that North
Vietnam did not face coup threats, and therefore adopted conventional war practices that maximized its
battlefield effectiveness. This is particularly interesting given that North Vietnamese civilian officials did
nonetheless meddle extensively in military affairs. The succession of South Vietnamese governments, in
contrast, faced significant risk of a military coup, and therefore were pressured to adopt organizational
practices that led them to perform poorly in the war. The exception, Talmadge argues, was the 1st division of
the South Vietnamese Army, which was far enough away from Saigon that it posed little coup threat. This
case nicely suggests that even within the same country, military units that pose a smaller coup threat to the
ruling regime are organized with more emphasis on conventional military effectiveness rather than being
hobbled by coup-proofing.
In her analysis of the Iran-Iraq war, Talmadge is able to highlight another form of intra-regime variation:
changes within the same country over time. For example, in Iraq, Saddam Hussein initially adopted coupproofing
practices, but focused increasingly on conventional capacity as the Iranian threat started to eclipse
the domestic one. Each of the four case studies uses and array of translated documents and other sources, and carefully puts those sources into context. Talmadge’s book is particularly strong in detailing how coup-proofing practices (its intervening variable) affected military performance, and Talmadge’s command of the individual battles she analyzes is impressive.Where the book leaves the reader wanting more is on the question of why and when regimes perceive coups to be a greater threat than conventional war, particularly among the cases of interest here, all of which involve countries that were fighting conventional wars and thus already faced a significant external conventional threat. The book’s central argument – that regimes tailor their military organizations to whichever threat they perceive to be greater – has a somewhat functionalist flavor. Regimes organize their militaries to prevent coups when they are most concerned about the threat of coups, and they organize their militaries to fight conventional conflicts when they believe that they require conventional capacities. While this is a reasonable and plausible argument, it leaves the reader wondering: when and why do the threat of coups loom large, and when and why do states prioritize external military effectiveness? On the question of coup threat, Talmadge argues that coups pose a particularly significant risk when a country has weak political institutions (with personalist regimes and military regimes being particularly coup-prone), and/or has a poor history of civil-military relations (20-22). External threats rise in importance when a regime faces “impending conflict with another state, or if the regime has foreign policy objectives that affirmatively require territorial revision.” (23) What Talmadge could do more to acknowledge is that many of these factors, on both the domestic and external side, are influenced by choices of the incumbent regime and leader, rather than being foisted on them. Some leaders (such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein), for whatever reason, aspire to create highly personalized dictatorships. That kind of regime gives the leader great domestic power, but increases the threat of coup attempts and therefore requires a coup-proofing strategy of military organization, which in turn hobbles military effectiveness. Other leaders (such as North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh) choose to develop stronger, if more constraining, political institutions, which provide them with firmer civilian control of the military and lowers the risk of coups. This allows them to prioritize the country’s conventional military power and further expansionist foreign policy goals, but undermines the leader’s personal control over policy. Put differently, leaders and regimes face significant tradeoffs in their choices about how to organize their country politically and militarily, and they have agency over these tradeoffs. This agency is particularly great when it comes to the decision to fight a conventional foreign war, which requires significant conventional military capacity. War usually does not come out of thin air: regimes can choosewhether to escalate a conflict to the point of war rather than reaching a peaceful bargain, and even more importantly, governments have substantial discretion in whether to pursue expansionist foreign policy objectives requiring conventional strength. But in order to be successful in their goals, these leaders must forgo coup-proofing strategies. What do they choose?Viewed this way, the balance between coup threat and external threat is not an exogenous independent variable causing the type of military organization. Rather, different leaders and regimes weigh the costs and benefits of different goals, and prioritize the goals – including battlefield effectiveness – that best suit them. Leaders cannot have it all. They can (try) to pursue domestic preeminence in a personalist regime, but then must accept some degree of external weakness due to the necessity of coup-proofing their military. Alternatively, a leader can try to pursue a successful expansionist foreign policy, but because that goal
H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews, Vol. VIII, No. 17 (2016) 20 | Pageprecludes coup-proofing, the leader will need to either run the risk of a military coup, or share power in the form of a single-party regime. Except for the rare instances in which the threat environment is foisted upon a leader, the threat environment is thus something to be explained rather than to be taken as given.Related issues bear on the historical case studies. Much of the book’s most persuasive and detailed evidence concerns not on how the threat environment causes leaders to choose specific patterns of military organization, but rather how military organizational practices affected performance on the battlefield. While Talmadge illustrates this effectively in her detailed case studies, this is also the part of the book whose findings are most established in the existing literature on the deleterious effects of coup-proofing on military effectiveness.2When it comes to assessing the effect of her primary independent variable – the threat environment – the book is less detailed. Talmadge helpfully provides ten indicators that she uses to determine whether the dominant threat to the state is coups or an external threat requiring conventional military capacity (35-36); seven of those factors increase the salience of coup threats, while three of those factors focus on external threats that create pressures to generate conventional capacities. But how does one know, ex ante, which threat is dominant in a particular case, and why? In the case of South Vietnam, for example, there are only two pages devoted to describing and coding the primary independent variable, the threat environment (52-53). It is not entirely clear where South Vietnam would stack up on the list of ten indicators, particularly given the domestic insurgency (which would mitigate in favor of conventional war-fighting capacity, according to her checklist). And the book does not discuss how the threat environment could have been a product of choices by the regime’s leaders. The same is true in the book’s one-page assessment of the threat environment of North Vietnam (63-64). The descriptions of the threat environment facing Saddam Hussein (150-155), and Iran (166-170) are longer, but they highlight the many choices leaders made in terms of how to organize their regimes politically and institutionally, thus creating their own domestic and international threat environments.3In sum, Talmadge has written an important book that shows persuasively that military organizational practices affect battlefield effectiveness. Her argument that the balance between internal and external threats constrains the regime’s choice of military organizational strategy raises many intriguing questions for future research. There is no doubt that scholars will take up that challenge. 2 E.g. Stephen Biddle and Robert Zirkle, “Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare in the Developing World,” Journal of Strategic Studies 19:2 (June 1996): 171-212; Brooks, Political-Military Relations; and James T. Quinlivan, “Coup-proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East,” International Security 24:2 (Fall 1999): 131-165.3 Relatedly, the discussion of the differences between the South Vietnamese 1st Division and other units is intriguing in making the case that this division was less threatening to the regime, and therefore was permitted to institute better conventional war-fighting practices. While Talmadge admits that the historical record does not allow her to establish that practices were different in the ARVN 1st because this division did not threaten a coup, but since this is one of the significant examples of intra-regime variation, it would be nice to see more evidence that the central government actually chose organizational practices that were different in the ARVN 1st, rather than simply sending their best soldiers to that division.
H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews, Vol. VIII, No. 17 (2016) 21 | PageAuthor’s Response by Caitlin Talmadge, The George Washington Universityt is a privilege to engage in a discussion of my book with the distinguished participants in this roundtable. I have learned a great deal from the scholarship of each and am delighted to have the opportunity to respond to their thoughtful and detailed reviews, which I hope will help spark further exploration of the ideas in The Dictator’s Army. In this essay I will briefly recap my book’s argument before addressing the reviewers’ comments regarding the book’s theory, empirics, methodology, and implications for future research. In The Dictator’s Army I sought to make sense of variation in military performance that is puzzling from the perspective of existing theories—particularly variation in military effectiveness across different units of the same military or in the same military over time. Such variation is hard to explain if military power is a function of fairly static factors such as national wealth or culture. I am pleased that the reviewers generally agree that this effort is one of the book’s strengths and that it helps us account for more fine-grained differences in the operational and tactical fighting power of armies. The argument and evidence show that militaries’ organizational practices—their key policies with respect to promotions, training, command and information management—stem fundamentally from the threat environment facing a given regime and powerfully modulate states’ abilities to use their material resources in the generation of fighting power on the battlefield. Ultimately, my goal was to offer a framework that could help scholars studying military performance, as well as policymakers seeking to assess or influence it in the real world. For methodological and substantive reasons I chose to focus my empirical work on authoritarian regimes. These states display significant variation in the internal and external threats that they face, the military organizational practices that they adopt, and the battlefield power that their armies generate. For example, authoritarian regimes almost always engage in significant politicization of the military, but my work shows that this politicization can take dramatically different forms, with some maximizing combat effectiveness and others hindering it. Understanding these differences is both a pressing practical concern as well as an important part of improving our general understanding of the role of political institutions, civil-military relations, and threats in shaping states’ behavior in war.Theoretical QuestionsJasen Castillo, Ryan Grauer, and Dan Reiter all raise variants of the same theoretical issue, which is whether all of the coup protection practices I emphasize in my theory are equally important and necessary. For example, can states choose to adopt only some of these measures and not others? Might certain combinations of coup protection measures be less damaging to conventional military performance than others? In other words, is the trade-off between coup protection and conventional military effectiveness as stark as I portray it to be? Both Castillo and Reiter point to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in particular as a leader who seems to have managed to engage in creative forms of coup-proofing that did not hinder battlefield effectiveness.I strongly endorse the reviewers’ call for further research in this area, especially on parallel militaries, which as Castillo notes may provide a way for leaders to check the regular military. The challenge with that approach, as I note in the book, is that leaders have to be able to ensure that the parallel military is both highly loyal andthat it has enough combat capability to protect the regime against the presumably larger and highly capable regular military (253, note 8). This is theoretically possible but practically difficult in many cases. For this I
H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews, Vol. VIII, No. 17 (2016) 22 | Pagereason, many regimes with parallel forces, such as the People’s Commissariat for International Affairs (NKVD) in the Soviet Union or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG) in Iran, still engage in additional coup-proofing measures that do hinder combat performance.1The Nazi regime had some unusual, perhaps unique, advantages that eased this trade-off, or at least delayed it. Chief among these were the Prussian martial tradition, which endowed the military with an enduring underlying competence, and the historically unprecedented Nazi ideological apparatus, which directed that competence toward the regime’s enemies and rendered coups nearly unthinkable.2 As I note in the book, Hitler generally “did not have to choose between competence and loyalty in his officer corps—there was an ample supply of men who possessed both, significantly reducing the coup risk that Hitler faced from building an externally effective army” (256, note 42). For example, even as Hitler built the SS, he generally did not interfere with the Wehrmacht’s long-standing adherence to rigorous training, and he initially devolved significant tactical and operational authority to military officers on the battlefield (256, notes 41, 42, 43). Interestingly, despite this extraordinary margin for maneuvering against both internal and external dangers, as the war went on Hitler did eventually confront the trade-offs identified in my theory. Growing more distrustful of his military, for example, he “commented that he often bitterly regretted not having purged his officer corps the way Stalin did.”3 In 1942-1943 he actually began to assume personal command of his field armies, with disastrous consequences for battlefield effectiveness, as the theory would predict (256, notes 41, 42, 43). Nevertheless, the Nazi case and others point to the need for further research about the conditions under which regimes do and don’t adopt particular constellations of coup-proofing measures, and with what effects.4Empirical QuestionsReiter also thoughtfully probes the applications and potential limits of the theory by raising two sets of empirical questions. One relates to the theory’s predictions in the South Vietnam case I examine. Reiter argues that the 1972 Easter Offensive losses and the decline of American military support should have heightened South Vietnam’s sense of external threat, leading to a reduction in coup-proofing and an improvement in military performance. The thrust of his criticism is that I understate the degree to which South Vietnam actually did this, and also perhaps that the theory predicts they should have done it even more vigorously than they did. I fully agree with Reiter that South Vietnam lessened its coup-proofing measures during and after the devastation of the Easter Offensive, and that these changes produced some improvements in South Vietnam’s 1 See also Caitlin Talmadge, “Different Threats, Different Militaries: Explaining Organizational Practices in Authoritarian Armies,” Security Studies 25:1 (spring 2016), 121, fn 23.2 On this ideology, see Castillo, Endurance and War, especially chapter 3. 3 Quotation from Joachim Fest,Plotting Hitler’s Death: The Story of the German Resistance (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 332. Noted in Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army, on p. 256.4 For work in this direction, see Dan Reiter, “The Coup-Proofing Toolbox: Dictator’s Choices, Military Effectiveness, and the Puzzle of Nazi Germany,” draft paper, May 2016.
H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews, Vol. VIII, No. 17 (2016) 23 | Pageeffectiveness. I document this process extensively in the book (108, 113-116, 137). However, I also argue that these changes were never as widespread as they would have needed to have been in order to maximize South Vietnamese battlefield effectiveness, for two reasons. First, I disagree with Reiter about how Saigon viewed the external threat environment. The balance of evidence indicates that Saigon believed right up until the end that some U.S. assistance might be forthcoming in the event of a truly catastrophic threat from the North, and that this hope muted the incentives South Vietnam might otherwise have faced to move more rapidly toward conventionally oriented military organizational practices. This is a running theme of my analysis of South Vietnam prior to the Easter Offensive (53, see also 40, 50), and the source that Reiter and I both reference for the period after that, George Veith’s Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75, shows that this reasoning continued to hold sway in Saigon.5 Beyond Nixon’s promise to “react vigorously” in the event of an attack from the North (which I cite, 56), Veith documents that even in September 1974, well after the 1973 legislation Reiter cites banning U.S. combat activity inside South Vietnam, President Ford was still providing backchannel reassurances of forthcoming aid.6 In fact, even amidst the actual North Vietnamese invasion in early 1975, Ford continued to send South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu “vague promises of support,” and according to Veith “Thieu still clung to a vain hope that B-52s would return.”7 All of this points to the fact that the signal from the threat environment was perhaps not as clear as Reiter suggests: yes, the conventional threat to the regime was growing, but the regime might still have outside help in dealing with that threat, so the external danger didn’t provide enough of a reason to wholly reorganize the military away from the enduring emphasis on coup protection—especially since coups remained a significant threat.That leads to my second point. My theory emphasizes that even when external threats are pressing, leaders often will still prioritize coup prevention for a variety of reasons (18-23). Furthermore, the theory argues that the process of moving from coup prevention practices toward conventional war practices is likely to be difficult, requiring very strong and unambiguous signals from the external threat environment, and also likely to be slow in military regimes whose factionalism is an obstacle to rapid decision-making (23-27, especially 25). In fact, this is consistent with what we see in the South Vietnamese case. Even as external, conventional threats grew stronger starting in 1972 (although we can debate by how much), “Thieu remained fearful of a coup,” as both Veith and I document (56).8 Given this lingering fear and the theory’s emphasis on the primacy of coup threats and the difficulty of change, I believe that South Vietnam’s half-hearted moves toward conventional warfare practices are in fact exactly what the argument would predict. In fact, the theory helps us make sense of South Vietnamese behavior that can otherwise seem puzzling for exactly the reasons Reiter identifies. In any event, Reiter’s criticism usefully shows how the connections posited in the theory—from threats to military organizational practices to effectiveness—can help us rigorously examine empirical evidence in order to understand why states behave as they do.5 George Veith, Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-1975(New York: Encounter Books, 2013). 6 Veith, Black April, 18 and 84-5. 7 Veith, Black April, 223.8 Veith, Black April, 26.
H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews, Vol. VIII, No. 17 (2016) 24 | PageReiter also asks to what extent the theory can explain Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s behavior from 1939-1945, which I mention briefly in the book (25). Again, Reiter and I agree that the overall pattern in the case is broadly consistent with the theory: in the pre-war environment, Stalin’s coup fears led to military organizational practices that hindered the generation of conventional, externally oriented military power, but as World War II posed an increasingly grave danger to the survival of Stalin’s regime, he pushed the military to adopt organizational practices geared toward defeating the Nazis. Reiter’s key question concerns the timing of these changes, and he argues that they may have come earlier than my theory expects. Specifically, he dates them to the period immediately following the disastrous Winter War of 1940 and argues that such a turn-about may confound my theory given that external threats to the Soviet Union were only “moderate” at this stage, before the Nazi betrayal of June 1941. I read the case somewhat differently. Although Stalin did implement some changes to military organizational practices during and immediately following the war in Finland, these were limited, in part because although the Winter War was a debacle, the invasions of Poland and the battle for Khalkin-Gol were seen as having been adequate.9 It is true that in 1940 Stalin made some changes, for example, releasing many officers who had been imprisoned in the purges and promoting General Semion Timoshenko, who then initiated some military reforms, especially with respect to training.10 But according to Roger Reese, “inspections... in 1941 revealed that none of the lessons of the Finnish war had been implemented in the training or organization of the divisions.... Nothing had changed.”11 Indeed, this is part of why the surprise Nazi invasion in June 1941 was so devastating.It was that onslaught, which, unlike the Winter War, actually had the potential to unseat the regime in Moscow, that seems finally to have galvanized Stalin to undertake a much more vigorous effort at military re-organization than had been the case in 1940.12 For example, Stalin ruthlessly began to weed out commanders who performed poorly in battle, and he improved the ability of different military units to coordinate their actions, even as he retained an ironclad personal grip on their activities.13 These changes did not transform the Soviet behemoth overnight, but, combined with the earlier efforts and Allied aid, they eventually resulted in 9 Roger Reese, The Soviet Military Experience: A History of the Soviet Army, 1917-1991(New York: Routledge, 2000), 98.10 On the releases, see Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of the Russia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 120. On Timoshenko, see Reese, The Soviet Military Experience, 99. 11 Roger Reese, Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918-1991(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), 146. See also Reese, The Soviet Military Experience, 97. 12 See David Glantz, Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War, 1941-1943(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005), especially chapters 1, 10, and 12; and David Glantz and Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2015), especially chapter 5. 13 Reese, Red Commanders, pp. 158-163, 175; and Glantz, Colussus Reborn, especially 370.
H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews, Vol. VIII, No. 17 (2016) 25 | Pageimproved battlefield effectiveness by 1943-1944.14 As such, I believe the case conforms to the theory’s predictions fairly tightly, though readers will have to examine the evidence for themselves to judge.Methodological QuestionsGrauer raises an important methodological point, which is whether the book’s basic conception of effectiveness is the most useful one. Is effectiveness really a property intrinsic to particular units, reflecting whether they can perform certain tasks such as basic tactics and complex operations, or is this notion better thought of simply as efficiency? In other words, Grauer wonders, for assessments of true effectiveness, do we also have to assess whether forces achieve their ultimate objectives in combat, which might include broader goals such as the destruction of adversary forces? Although Grauer cautions that this questioning may be “pedantic” and acknowledges that adopting his alternative conceptualization of effectiveness wouldn’t alter my book’s basic findings, his question is one I considered closely.Ultimately I chose to define effectiveness as I did because I wanted to focus specifically on battlefield effectiveness, that is, operational and tactical fighting power (4-8). As Betts notes in his introduction, scholars have paid relatively less attention to these levels of warfare, so I sought to make a contribution there. I was particularly interested in trying to understand which armies could conduct the key tasks envisaged in Stephen Biddle’s highly influential concept known as the “modern system” of warfare, which is indeed more narrowly focused on specific operational tasks.15 Grauer’s alternative definition starts to shade closer to strategic effectiveness, which of course also merits inquiry but is distinct. Furthermore, armies usually have to be tactically and operationally effective in the ways I describe in order for them to achieve the broader effectiveness that is of interest to Grauer. Hence in many ways I see my book as a prerequisite to doing the type of analysis he envisions, and which I agree is important. Last, I tried to stay away from the emphasis on efficiency that Grauer mentions because, to me, efficiency always implies some reference to the resources that an army uses to generate a given level of fighting power. It is, in essence, grading on a curve—asking whether we think an army fought well given the resources available to it, rather than according to some objective standard (4). For example, even though my book rates elite Iraqi units as effective in the closing battles of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, I would not rate the Iraqi military as being efficient. Given Iraq’s material resources, it arguably should have performed at least that well years earlier than it did and on a much wider scale. Nevertheless, Iraq did get eventually get the job done on the battlefield, albeit at great cost (230-2). By contrast, I would rate the North Vietnamese as being both effective and efficient—performing the key tasks of modern battle and managing to do so with minimal material resources. This contrast suggests that efficiency and effectiveness, while both important, are distinct. Jessica Weeks raises a second methodological concern, expressing a desire to know more about “why and whenleaders perceive coups to be a greater threat than conventional wars.” In her view, the threat environment, both domestically and internationally, is not an exogenous variable. Rather, “these factors,” in her view, “are influenced by choices of the incumbent regime and leader, rather than being foisted on them..... They have 14 See also Talmadge, “Different Threats, Different Militaries,” 119-20, fn 21.15 Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews, Vol. VIII, No. 17 (2016) 26 | Pageagency over these trade-offs.” Weeks is right that we can always know more about why particular states make particular choices, and I share her hope that future researchers will take up this challenge.I chose to treat the threat environment as exogenous for two reasons. First, even if we believe that leaders “create” their own threat environments, it isn’t clear that knowing how and why they make these choices gives us additional leverage over understanding the battlefield power that their armies will generate. In other words, we don't have good reason to believe that these choices systematically confound the causal relationships emphasized in the book in ways that would substantially change the findings (indeed, Weeks does not make this claim). Given that the threat environment is acknowledged to be analytically powerful, no matter whether we think it is foisted upon leaders or engineered by them, I chose in the interests of parsimony to begin my analysis there.Second, the leaders in all four of the states I examine clearly did face significant constraints in their ability to shape their threat environments. In South Vietnam, for example, leaders inherited a hobbled post-colonial army and faced a severe internal legitimacy challenge, followed soon by a foreign-backed insurgency and eventually an invasion, all of which they no doubt happily would have avoided if given the option (43-53). But as I discuss extensively in chapters 2 and 3, it isn’t clear that alternative patterns of military organization were really available to them given the prominence of coup threats that plagued the regime from its inception (54-62). Indeed, my framework expects these coup threats to dominate leader concerns even where other threats are very serious (22), which is exactly what happened in South Vietnam. Similarly, leaders in Tehran in 1980 were taken by surprise when the Iraqis invaded and clearly had not designed Iran’s military forces for dealing with such a threat. Nor is it clear that they could have or should have, given the institutional chaos of the revolution and the multiple other dangers facing the nascent regime, including coups (139-150, 165-177). As the initiators of their wars, North Vietnamese and Iraqi leaders clearly did have more agency over their threat environments, although even there it is important not to overstate the extent to which Ho Chi Minh and Saddam truly had the ability to build the domestic institutions and external conditions that they would have preferred. For example, Saddam launched the Iran-Iraq War impulsively, and, in his own mind, defensively, as a means of pushing back against revolutionary Iran’s potential threat to his Sunni Ba’athist regime (142-146). Moreover, Saddam’s persistent prioritization of coup protection measures both before and during most of this war was rooted in a sadly accurate understanding of deeply rooted features of Iraqi political life that pre-dated him (150-55) and that persist even today.It is notable, for example, that even after overthrow of the Ba’athist regime and tremendous U.S. pressure to build democratic institutions, the succession of Shi’a leaders in post-2003 Iraq all have read their domestic threat environment very similarly to how Saddam and his predecessors did. As a result, these new leaders have adopted military organizational practices that are strikingly familiar and that have produced similarly costly battlefield outcomes.16 These continuities suggest that leaders may be more constrained and reactive than is often recognized, and that treating their threat environments as exogenous is analytically reasonable. 16 Keren Fraiman, Austin Long, and Caitlin Talmadge, “Why the Iraqi Army collapsed (and what can be done about it,” Monkey Cage blog, Washington Post, 13 June 2014; Cailtin Talmadge and Austin Long, “Why the U.S. (Still) Can’t Train the Iraqi Military,” Monkey Cage blog, Washington Post, 22 September 2015; and Caitlin Talmadge and Joshua Rovner, “Why Victory in Mosul Won’t Solve America’s Iraq Conundrum,” Lawfare blog post, 10 April 2016.
H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews, Vol. VIII, No. 17 (2016) 27 | PageNevertheless, Weeks is right to note that more theorizing on this subject is warranted, and her review points to a host of promising additional research questions that I hope will receive attention.Toward a Future Research Agenda The reviewers outline several other ideas for future research as well, most of which I heartily endorse. First, as Castillo notes, there are good reasons to wonder if my framework offers insight into the military performance of democracies as well as well as dictatorships, and I agree with his suggestion that future research should explore this possibility. Indeed, my focus on regime strength—rather than regime type—as a major indicator of the threat environment points in this direction, as Grauer notes as well. Presumably, as he explains, regime institutional strength can vary within democracies as well as autocracies, as can civil-military relations, the other major indicator I develop. I briefly touch on this possibility in the book’s first chapter, noting that just as some stable autocracies can be quite well institutionalized, some nascent democracies can be quite coup-prone (21), and as such we might expect them to perform poorly on the battlefield (32-3). Hence some of the most critical variation in military performance probably does cut across regime type, as the reviewers note.Betts makes a related point that even within autocratic regimes, there is important additional variation to explore, and I agree. I tried to get at some of these distinctions in The Dictator’s Army, taking my cue from Barbara Geddes’s insight that “different kinds of authoritarianism differ from each other as much as they differ from democracy,” as well as from Weeks’s scholarship on varieties of authoritarianism.17 One of my central findings was that we should not expect uniform patterns of military organization in authoritarian states, because the threat environments facing these regimes can be so different. In general, however, Betts’s comments and those of the other reviewers shore up the need to continue to refine our understanding of how political institutions ultimately shape military performance—a challenge that one of the other reviewers, Dan Reiter, has powerfully addressed as well and that I hope my book will help future researchers continue to engage.18Castillo and Grauer also both raise important questions about the role of ideology in explaining military performance, which I agree future research should explore more closely than I did in The Dictator’s Army.19My framework sought to explain two major aspects of battlefield performance: basic tactical proficiency and the ability to conduct more complex operations that require both initiative and coordination across different combat arms or units. I did not incorporate ideology as a primary driver of these components of military performance because I think they are mostly a function of military organizational practices that regimes adopt in response to the internal and external threats that they face. Nevertheless, Grauer notes that in some cases ideology itself may shape how regimes understand their threat environments, and Castillo suggests that regimes also can use ideology as a tool for managing the threat environment. These are both intriguing 17 Barbara Geddes, “What Do We Know About Democratization After Twenty Years?” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (June 1999), 121; and Jessica L.P. Weeks, Dictators at War and Peace (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 18 Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).19 Promising work in this direction includes Jason Lyall, Paths of Ruin: Explaining Military Effectiveness in Conventional War, unpublished book manuscript, 2016, which explores the role of exclusionary regime ideologies in shaping military power.
H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable Reviews, Vol. VIII, No. 17 (2016) 28 | Pagepossibilities that scholars should explore further in other cases, and in fact I mention them briefly in my discussion of the role of nationalism in the Vietnam cases (134).Furthermore, Castillo’s own work has shown that ideology is a critical driver of a different and very important component of military performance: cohesion.20 He correctly notes in his review that I largely bracket the question of cohesion in my book, although I agree with him that it is a prerequisite to the components of military performance that I examine (7) and that the military organizational practices I emphasize are likely to reinforce or undermine cohesion in ways the book does not explicitly address. For example, good training probably builds soldiers’ confidence in their leaders and in their units’ proficiency, which should strengthen soldiers’ willingness to stand and fight under difficult conditions. In short, the ‘will’ and ‘skill’ components of military effectiveness are likely interrelated, as Castillo suggests.Despite this connection, however, I do think that my book highlights the often distinctive origins and effects of these two components of military performance. For example, I note in my case study of Iran that Iranian cohesion was the one strong point in the military performance of Iran’s revolutionary forces and that this cohesion probably had ideological sources (228-230). Still, Iran’s persistent difficulty with tactical proficiency and complex operations suggests to me just how distinct cohesion can be from these other aspects of battlefield performance. Iran’s army was extremely ideological and extraordinarily cohesive but still not very tactically and operationally effective due to the internal threats facing Iranian leaders and the military organizational practices that those threats engendered. Iran’s experience stands in contrast to that of the North Vietnamese, for example, whose units were cohesive as well as tactically proficient and capable of complex operations. Clearly, North Vietnam was able to harness the military power of ideologically motivated cohesion, while Iran squandered it. Future research should build on both Castillo’s work and my own to try to develop a more integrated understanding of this sort of variation. The relationship between will and skill is clearly important, and Castillo is also right that fully understanding it may require exploration of additional hurdles that face some militaries, such as class divisions in the society from which these militaries draw recruits. I thank him and the other reviewers for bringing all of these issues into the conversation about The Dictator’s Army, and I look forward to seeing where the discussion goes next. 20 Jasen Castillo, Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). See also the H-Diplo roundtable on the book, forthcoming.
The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness inAuthoritarian Regimes. By Caitlin Talmadge. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2015. 320p. $79.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.doi:10.1017/S153759271600270X— David M. Edelstein,Georgetown UniversityIn her important new book, Caitlin Talmadge examinesthe causes of variation in military effectiveness on thebattlefield. In Talmadge’s view, material, ideational, andinstitutional factors alone cannot account for this varia-tion, and so she offers an alternative theoretical explana-tion that focuses on the threat environment that states andtheir leaders confront. When leaders face internal threats,they pursue coup-proofing steps that tend to underminethose practices—merit-based promotion, regular and ef-fective training, sensible command arrangements, andefficient information management—that are necessaryfor battlefield effectiveness. When such internal threatsare absent, states are more likely to adopt practices thatallow them to respond effectively to external militarythreats. Talmadge then tests her argument against alter-native theoretical arguments through a series of masterfulcase studies of the battlefield effectiveness of authoritarianregimes, in particular.The Dictator’s Armyis clearly andconvincingly written. The logic of the argument isgenerally sound. And the contribution is significant toboth the theoretical study of military effectiveness and thepractical challenge of confronting authoritarian regimesand their militaries.For all its virtues, important questions arise about boththe generalizability of the theoretical claims and theinternal logic of the argument contained in Talmadge’smonograph. On generalizability, the author limits herempirical analysis to authoritarian regimes. This is obvi-ously an important subset of cases, and in recent years,a variety of contributions have been made that explainvariation within and among authoritarian regimes. More-over, from a policy perspective, confrontations betweendemocracies and authoritarian regimes are relatively com-mon; thus, understanding the sources of variation in thebattlefield effectiveness of authoritarian regimes is conse-quential. That said, explaining the military effectiveness ofregimes other than authoritarian governments is alsocritically important, and Talmadge’s argument is likelyto be of limited use for such cases. The argument reliescentrally on variation in the level of internal threats topolitical leaders. While such threats may be relativelycommon in authoritarian states, they are far less present indemocratic regimes. To the extent that the level of internalthreats tends to be low in democracies, her argument maybe less useful in accounting for variation in their militaryeffectiveness.Beyond the generalizability of the argument, there area number of questions that arise within the logic of it.Most importantly, in Talmadge’s logic, the need to coup-proof a regime undermines those practices that enablemilitaries to be effective. But it seems conceivable that thecausal relationship could work in the opposite direction. Ifa regime pursues unsound military policies and playfavorites rather than rewarding merit, then it may makeitself more likely to be the target of a coup attempt. Suchpotential endogeneity raises the question of whether coup-proofing leads to poor military performance or, rather,938Perspectives on PoliticsBook Reviews |International Relations
whether poor military practices lead a regime to confrontpotential coups.Along similar lines, one also wonders about therelationship between internal and external threats, whichTalmadge tends to treat as wholly independent of oneanother. In fact, though, one might examine whether thepresence of a strong external threat makes a regime moreor less susceptible to a potential coup. If an external threatleads a state and its military to“rally around theflag,”then it might reduce the possibility of a coup. In fact, thismight incentivize leaders to provoke diversionary threatsthat minimize the internal threats to their rule. On theother hand, if a state’s military is unhappy about theexternal threat and holds leadership accountable for thatthreat, then it might conceivably lead to a higher coupthreat. The point is that internal and external threats donot exist in isolation from each other, but rather theinterrelationship between the two generates strategicincentives for different actors to manipulate those threats.Acknowledging that external and internal threats arerelated leads to a subsequent question about how externalactors might attempt to manipulate the threat environ-ment in potential adversaries. If a high likelihood ofa coup leads to practices that undermine a state’seffectiveness on the battlefield, then external actors mighthave an incentive to attempt to increase the probability ofa coup in a would-be adversary. As I just suggested, thiscould be done simply by posing a threat that affectsa military’s view of the regime, or it could be done byproviding support to military leaders who might betempted to launch a coup against the regime. Of course,there are limits to what any book can consider in its pages,but future research could also consider how other states arelikely to behave if Talmadge’s argument is correct. Whatkind of incentives does it provide all actors to manipulatethe threat environment of a state?Talmadge’s case studies are models of effective qualita-tive research. The author sheds new light on familiar cases,such as Vietnam, while offering comprehensive analysis ofless studied cases, such as the Iran—Iraq war. The cases aremeticulously researched, and the empirical chapters areclearly and cogently structured in order to consider themerits andflaws of alternative theoretical arguments. Mymost significant discomfort with the case studies is the easewith which states seem to move from more or less effectivemilitary practices to some alternative. To maximize theeffect of her theoretical analysis, Talmadge highlightswithin case variation—both regionally and temporally—but the transition from sound to unsound militarypractices seems to occur more seamlessly than one mightexpect. The practices that form the foundation of aneffective military are difficult institutions to establish andonly slightly less difficult to tear down. Her analysis wouldhave benefited from more attention to the substantialfriction that attends the processes she examines.None of these criticisms should be read as under-mining the significant contributions of this book. In fact,all of them suggest questions for future research that thebook provokes, rather than fundamentalflaws in the logicor empirical analysis. More generally, beyond the intrinsicmerits of her work, Talmadge is to be praised for bringingattention to the important, but still understudied, topicof military effectiveness. As thefield of security studieshas understandably shifted over the last decade to thestudy of terrorism and insurgency,The Dictator’s Armyisan important reminder that conflict between statesremains not only possible but likely in coming years anddecades. To the extent that this is true, and to the extentthat such conflicts are likely to involve authoritarianregimes, it is critically important to consider why somemilitaries from authoritarian states perform better thanothers. Beyond the study of military effectiveness, thebook also joins a growing body of literature that inves-tigates the dynamics of authoritarian regimes, not asa single unvariegated type but, rather, as a set of statesfacing varying internal and external threats.For all of these reasons, Talmadge is to be praised forwriting an important, provocative book that is sure tofind its way onto the desks of scholars, policymakers, andmilitary leaders.
Quoted in Sidelights: Talmadge’s book makes a large theoretical contribution. Differentiating between internal and external threats sub-stantially advances our understanding of how the security environment shapes the organizational choices that mili-taries make.Book ReviewMichael C. Horowitz,University of PennsylvaniaThe Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in AuthoritarianRegimes. By Caitlin Talmadge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 2015.What explains the relative effectiveness of countries on thebattlefield? This question, seemingly simple, has generateddozens of explanations over the last several decades rootedinfields from history to political science to sociology and be-yond. In her new book,The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Ef-fectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes, Caitlin Talmadge makesa novel and important contribution to the literature on mili-tary performance. She shows that a series of choices aboutpromotion patterns, training, information management, andcommand predicts whether countries will perform up to theircapabilities in conventional war. However, whether countriesoptimize their militaries for conventional war depends not onwhether a country is a democracy, or its level of material ca-pabilities, but on the type of threat it perceives itself as facing.Countries facing internal threats, which are often but notalways autocracies, tend to“coup proof”their militaries—designing them to defeat internal threats in a way that makesthem less capable offighting conventional wars. Talmadgecalls these“coup prevention practices.”In contrast, coun-tries that view themselves as facing primarily external threatsare more likely to promote soldiers based on merit, conductrealistic training, and implement other organizational prac-tices that make the resulting military more capable offight-ing external adversaries. Talmadge codes these militaries ashaving adopted“conventional war practices.”Talmadge’s book makes a large theoretical contribution.Differentiating between internal and external threats sub-stantially advances our understanding of how the securityenvironment shapes the organizational choices that mili-taries make. Moreover, her specific and detailed assessmentof the particular military organizational practices that makebattlefield success more likely brings greater rigor andstructure to this area of security studies and will shape howfuture scholars approach military effectiveness.The case studies Talmadge chooses to test her theory, Northand South Vietnam, as well as Iran and Iraq, are sensiblechoices given the structure of the security studies literatureand the ability to leverage within-case variation due to thelong conflicts each fought. The case studies are also well re-searched. As with all books, however, Talmadge’s effort doesraise some questions. For example, why did South Vietnam’smilitary, beyond the 1st Division, fail to improve in time forthe Laos campaign in 1971 after the external threat to SouthVietnam from North Vietnam’s military became clear (97–98)? The answer could be that the Army of the Republic ofVietnam (ARVN), South Vietnam’s military, still believed theUS military would intervene in the end to save it from NorthVietnam, but this is not explored in depth. Yet this would nothave been true in the 1975 campaign, when it should havebeen clear to the ARVN that the US military was not comingback. If organizational or regime factors explain the ARVN’sfailure to improve at conventional warfighting despite a clearconventional threat, this requires more explanation. Perhapsit is the case, for example, that the threat environment helpsdrive military organizational practices, but that some practicesbecome locked-in in ways that are difficult to change in theshort term even if the threat environment shifts.This question of the time gap between changes in the threatenvironment and shifts in conventional warfighting perfor-mance, via different military organizational practices, surfacesin Talmadge’s examination of the Iraqi military as well. Tal-madgefinds that the organizational practices of Iraq’sRe-publican Guard improved by 1987, as did some other elementsof the Iraqi military, giving it the ability to conduct morecomplex operations in part in 1987 and then more clearly in1988 (212, 221–22, 226–28). Talmadge’sexplanationisthatIraqi leader Saddam Hussein feared he could lose power iffurther losses in the war with Iran occurred, meaning“adopt-ing conventional war practices became the best way forThe Journal of Politics, volume 78, number 4. Published online September 15, 2016.For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu.e36
Saddam to keep himself in power”(210). This is a goodpoint, but why was Iraq’s military able to change militaryorganizational practices so quickly, while South Vietnam’slagged? One reason could be regime type; Talmadge arguesthat, as a personalist leader, Saddam was well positioned toforce rapid implementation of reforms (210). In contrast, SouthVietnam’s government was fractured. If true, this suggests apotential advantage for some types of autocracies and alsointeracts with other research on how incentives for staying inpower and regime type influence national military behavior(Chiozza and Goemans 2011; Weeks 2008). However, com-paring the Iraq and South Vietnam cases would also suggestthat it is not the threat environment alone that influencesnational military behavior but an interaction between thethreat environment and domestic political institutions.More broadly, for Talmadge, military organizational prac-tices are generally an intervening variable predicted by thethreat environment. Yet some of the literature on militaryeffectiveness beyond the regime type debate suggests thatmilitary organizations have an independent effect on battle-field outcomes, such as Biddle’s (2005) theory about themodern system. One thing research building on Talmadge’saccount could add is an assessment of the extent to which thethreat environment determines the military organizationalpractices of a given country, versus the extent to which thethreat environment may represent an important variable, butfar from the only variable, in determining how militaries or-ganize themselves. This is less a criticism of Talmadge, per se,given the preexisting literature, than a suggestion that this typeof integration could represent a path forward.Talmadge’s book also suggests future possibilities for re-search in the military effectiveness arena focused on the re-lationship between the threat environment, organizationalpolitics, and battlefield outcomes. Talmadge suggests, for ex-ample, that many states adopt mixes between the ideal typesof conventional war practices and coup prevention practices(24). What explains when that occurs—and what the mixlooks like? This is an interesting arena for future research.None of these issues should distract potential readers fromthe fundamental and large contribution thatThe Dictator’sArmymakes. By combining novel theory with in-depth re-search on variation over time in the warfighting performanceof several important militaries, Talmadge’s research on thelink between the threat environment and military effective-ness represents a significant advance in the literature on mil-itary power, and one that those interested in military force andorganizational politics shouldfind extremely useful.REFERENCESBiddle, Stephen. 2005.Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat inModern Battle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Chiozza, Giacomo, and Hein E. Goemans. 2011.Leaders and InternationalConflict. New York: Cambridge University Press.Weeks, Jessica L. 2008.“Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type andSignaling Resolve.”International Organization62 (1): 35–64